By Katriona Chapman (Fantagraphics Books, Inc)
ISBN: 979-8-8750-0065-2 (HB)
There are so very many graphic novels these days. Some are awful, many are so-so and the rest I endeavour to share with you. Of that remaining fraction, most can be summarised, plot-pointed and précised to give you a notion about what you might be buying if I’ve done my job right. Sometimes, however, all that fuss and blather is not only irrelevant but will actually impede your eventual enjoyment. This is one of those times so my advice is just to stop now, buy the book and render your own judgement…
Katriona Chapman is a fantastically observant story-maker based in London, from where she crafts superbly sublime tales for Small Press titles like Tiny Pencil (which she-cofounded), Comic Book Slumber Party, Ink & Paper, Save Our Souls, Deep Space Canine and her award-winning Katzine. Chapman draws beautifully and subtly, with a deep knowledge of tone and appreciation of hue, concentrating on people in the background as much as all the attention-grabbers we’re accustomed to and increasingly afflicted by in social interactions.
She hasn’t spent all her life in the Smoke, as revealed in her award-winning debut graphic travel memoir Follow Me In, or moody exploration of age and loneliness Breakwater. Her longer stories are about places around people. Chapman knows how to quietly sneak up and stage a scene perfectly before grabbing your undivided attention and never letting go. Locations don’t have to be expansive or impressive to become playing characters in the dramas they support, and that’s compellingly proved here.
Most tellingly, Chapman utterly and implicitly understands the mechanisms and value of calligraphic silence on a page: letting images do the work, shape reader emotion and tell the tale. Our art form is jampacked with the explosive, eccentric and exotic: stories and depictions of the ultra-extraordinary, but life isn’t like that. Life for most of us is like The Pass…
The demands of friends and expectations of family are a real pressure cooker for thirty-something Claudia Durand. Fiercely independent child of a internationally celebrated (but rather officious, controlling and overbearing) Chef and a helicopter mother, the daughter’s dream of being an enterprising restaurateur and food innovator in her own right seems to be coming true at last.
Never good with emotional conflict, asking for help or meddling interference, “Claude” has nonetheless opened her own up-&-coming bistro – The Alley – in insalubrious Southwark. Ignoring unsought parental guidance throughout, after five long years she is making waves: catching the favourable attention of Food Critics and enjoying commercial progress despite the economic situation, fickle tastes, self-doubt and that ever-present unwanted family oversight.
Naturally, she couldn’t have done it without the collaboration of her team: best friend/sous chef Lisa Turner – with her brother Jack doing the accounts and skivvying – and new barman/botanically adept experimental mixologist Ben readily adapting to working with them. Not to mention core server Adrienne and all the rest elbows-deep in the cut & thrust hurly-burly of the modern fashionable bistro experience….
With everything starting to gel and come together over Christmas, Claudia can’t really understand why – in a moment of giddy euphoria and media encouragement – she opts to pile on more pressure by finally entering the Chef of the Year competition…
Then, as if day-to-day business stresses were not bad enough and as self-inflicted anxieties over the contest grow nigh-intolerable, her pot boils over when in a moment of exhaustion-fuelled intimacy and need, she kisses someone she really shouldn’t have. Now everything has to change…
Food as fashion and entertainment has become a compelling arena for modern drama in recent years and this powerfully engaging exploration of the struggles that come with the smiles and piles of fodder is a potent blend of transitional growing experiences and how other people live, meeting challenging crises head on and all-out.
Love, duty, betrayal, loyalty, self-expression, search for identity and ambition drive us all and here are carefully mixed and presented for your delectation. You would be churlish to refuse a taste and should actually demand a second heaping helping.
All characters, stories and artwork © 2025 Katriona Chapman. This edition of The Pass © 2026 Fantagraphics Books, Inc All rights reserved.
Today in 1927, pioneering US cartoonist Brumsic Brandon Jr. (Luther) was born, just like Belgian strip artist René Follet in 1931 and French comics scripter Jacques de Loustal in 1956. Artist Scott Hampton arrived in 1959 and Canadian comics visionary Bill Marks in 1962. In 1988 Bill Amend’s still-unfolding science-y soap opera strip FoxTrot began, and in 2004 we lost the astounding cartoonist Chester Commodore.